Table of Contents

A novelist, social historian, and political activist, Waldo Frank was born on August 25,
1889 to an upper-middle class, Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. A prolific writer,
Frank penned fourteen novels, eighteen volumes of social history, and well over one hundred
articles on literary and political subjects. Once considered one of America's premier intellectuals,
Frank has since slipped into relative obscurity. Only in Latin America are his books still widely
read.

Frank had already completed his first novel, Builders in Sand, by the age of seventeen,
though it was never published. The same year, he was expelled from his public high school for
refusing to enroll in a required Shakespeare course; he felt he knew more than the teacher. He is
said to have read over a thousand books before he went to college. After his expulsion, his
parents sent him to a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was introduced to the
great French writers and where he began work on his second volume, The Spirit of Modern
French Letters, which never saw publication. He eventually returned to the United States and
was graduated with both a B.A. and an M.A. from Yale in 1911.

Frank's first published novel, The Unwelcome Man: A Novel, is a psychoanalytic look into
the life of Quincy Burt, a man struggling to find his place in a tumultuous, industrial society.
Faced with the realization that he does not belong, the man purchases a gun with the intention of
committing suicide; however, before he pulls the trigger, he realizes that he does belong precisely
because, like everyone else, he is already dead, both spiritually and intellectually. Frank owed
much of the inspiration for this novel to American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and
especially Walt Whitman. A self-professed "naturalistic mystic," Frank's ideology came from a
fusion of Freud, Hegel, Marx, Spinoza, Eastern mysticism, Judaism, and American
transcendentalism. He believed that many of the world's problems would be solved if each
individual achieved a oneness or wholeness with the universe.

In addition to his novel writing, Frank made his presence known in journals and
magazines. In 1914, he was made associate editor of Seven Arts, a journal which ran for just
twelve installments but was nevertheless an important forum in which artists and writers could
express their politics. Frank also became a regular contributor to the New Yorker in 1925 under
the pseudonym, "Search-light." That same year he was named contributing editor of the New
Republic.

Frank followed The Unwelcome Man with The Dark Mother (1920), and a series he called
"The Lyric Novels," because they offer an emotional rather than rational experience, much like
poetry. These novels include City Block (1922); Rehab (1922); Holiday (1923); and Chalk Face
(1924).

City Block and Rehab did not received the critical attention Frank felt they deserved; T.S.
Eliot's The Wasteland appeared the same year, and Frank's novels went relatively unnoticed.
Disenchanted, Frank abandoned his fiction writing. Between the years 1924 to 1925, he wrote
ninety-seven articles, two plays, and Virgin Spain: Scenes from the Spiritual Drama of a Great
People, a cultural study of Spain for which he earned widespread recognition and critical acclaim
in Latin America. The success of Virgin Spain led to the publication of The Re-discovery of
America: An Introduction to a philosophy of American Life (1929); America Hispana: A Portrait
and a Prospect (1931); and Dawn in Russia: The Record of a Journey (1932). During this time,
Frank became more active politically, attending meetings, strikes, and protests with Sherwood
Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and others.

Despite a successful lecture tour of Latin America in 1942 and the subsequent publication of
South American Journey (1943) and Birth of a World: Simon Bolivar in Terms of His Peoples
(1951), Frank returned to novel writing. In his later years, his popularity had declined to such an
extent that he could not find publishers for his last two novels. He died in 1967, already forgotten
by readers and critics alike.

Spanning the years 1922 to 1965, the papers of American author Waldo Frank comprise .6 linear feet (78
items) of letters, essays, lectures, poems, photographs and ephemera. Most of the items are
related to his career as a social historian and political activist.

The collection is divided into four series: Letters to Waldo Frank, 1932-1959; Writings by
Waldo Frank, 1942; Photographs and Ephemera, [n.d.]; and Writings by Others.

Perhaps most interesting in this collection are Waldo Frank's writings, which include a
series of lectures Frank delivered in Latin America in 1942. In April of 1941, Frank turned down
the State Department's offer of four thousand dollars to lecture in South America against
Fascism. However, a flood of letters from his Latin American friends and the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor convinced him to accept the position as an unofficial representative of the United
States Government. From mid-April to October of 1942, he lectured extensively in Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, and Columbia in an effort to combat Fascist propaganda. His
efforts received both praise and criticism. On August 1, the Argentine government declared him
persona non grata, and he was attacked in his apartment in Buenos Aires the following day.
Frank landed in the hospital as well as on the front page of the New York Times. The publicity he
received from the lectures and subsequent attack inspired him to publish the lectures under the
title Ustedes y nostros: Nuevo mensaje a Ibero-America. Five of the seven lectures may be found
in this collection.

In the first lecture, La Guerra que esta debajo de la guerra, Frank urged Latin Americans
to stand up for themselves against Fascism, an argument taken one step further in his second
lecture, Ustedes y Nostros. Here, he predicted that if the South Americans could rid themselves
of Facsism, a new world would emerge, a culturally and artistically superior world which he
considered the destiny of the Americas. The third and fourth lectures were united under the
common title, Los dos Caminos. The first part, Hacia la derrota del hombre, targeted the youth
of South America. Frank warned them against joining Fascists gangs and argued that they should
align themselves not with the Left or the Right, but with humanity. He urged them to create what
he called the "City of Man." The fourth lecture, Hacia el destino humano, is more spiritual than
the others, and in this one Frank urged Latin Americans to defeat Fascism while simultaneously
attempting to become whole persons. At the end of the speech, he asked the people if their
silence was one of death or rebirth. The fifth lecture, Los Elementos del nuevo mundo en los
Estados unidos, is a discussion of the United States government's interest in Latin America.
These lectures would be of particular interest to students of Latin American history as well as
those interested in analyzing the role of the United States in early to mid-twentieth century
international affairs.

Note: The University of Delaware Library also houses the library of Waldo Frank which may be
located by using the following keyword search in DELCAT: k = waldo frank library.